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NASA’s TESS Mission Hopes to Find Exoplanets Beyond Our Solar System

The worlds orbiting other stars are called “exoplanets,” and they come in a wide variety of sizes, from gas giants larger than Jupiter to small, rocky planets about as big around as Earth or Mars. This rocky super-Earth is an illustration of the type of planets future telescopes, like NASA’s TESS, hope to find outside our solar system. via NASA https://ift.tt/2HAq6VW

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M22 and the Wanderers

Wandering through the constellation Sagittarius, bright planets Mars and Saturn appeared together in early morning skies over the last weeks. They are captured in this 3 degree wide field-of-view from March 31 in a close celestial triangle with large globular star cluster Messier 22. Of course M22 (bottom left) is about 10,000 light-years distant, a massive ball of over 100,000 stars much older than our Sun. Pale yellow and shining by reflected sunlight, Saturn (on top) is about 82 light-minutes away. Look carefully and you can spot large moon Titan as a pinpoint of light at about the 5 o’clock position in the glare of Saturn’s overexposed disk. Slightly brighter and redder Mars is 9 light-minutes distant. While both planets are moving on toward upcoming oppositions, by July Mars will become much brighter still, with good telescopic views near its 2018 opposition a mere 3.2 light-minutes from planet Earth. via NASA https://ift.tt/2qrEM27

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NASA Television to Air Launch of Next Planet-Hunting Mission

On a mission to detect planets outside of our solar system, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT Monday, April 16. Prelaunch mission coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency’s website Sunday, April 15, with three live briefings.

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The Aurora and the Sunrise

Auroras are one of the many Earthly phenomena the crew of the International Space Station observe from their perch high above the planet. via NASA https://ift.tt/2EEdzxh

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Our Sun: Three Different Wavelengths

From March 20-23, 2018, the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a series of images of our Sun and then ran together three sequences in three different extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. via NASA https://ift.tt/2Hbs8xK

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NASA Announces New Chief Scientist

Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot has named the Science Mission Directorate’s Planetary Science Division Director Jim Green as the agency’s new chief scientist, effective May 1. He succeeds Dr. Gale Allen, who has served in an acting capacity since 2016 and will retire after more than 30 years of government service.

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We Were There: 2018 USA Science and Engineering Festival

Attendees talk with NASA staff at exhibit booths during Sneak Peek Friday at the USA Science and Engineering Festival, Friday, April 6, 2018. At the festival, NASA showcased the future of human space exploration – including the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System rocket. via NASA https://ift.tt/2Hcq20R

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The Sun Unleashed: Monster Filament in Ultraviolet

One of the most spectacular solar sights is an explosive flare. In 2011 June, the Sun unleashed somewhat impressive, medium-sized solar flare as rotation carried active regions of sunpots toward the solar limb. That flare, though, was followed by an astounding gush of magnetized plasma — a monster filament seen erupting at the Sun’s edge in this extreme ultraviolet image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Featured here is a time-lapse video of that hours-long event showing darker, cooler plasma raining down across a broad area of the Sun’s surface, arcing along otherwise invisible magnetic field lines. An associated coronal mass ejection, a massive cloud of high energy particles, was blasted in the general direction of the Earth,and made a glancing blow to Earth’s magnetosphere. via NASA https://ift.tt/2qiokjX